He's An Able-bodied Male, But This Man Isn't Handy

April 26, 1985|By STephen Wigler of the Sentinel Staff

Last week I paid a visit to a friend in Ohio as he was preparing to move into his new house. Actually, Ed's house was not new. A 19th-century farmhouse, it was in execrable condition when he bought it. Ed had gutted it and was completely rebuilding and refinishing the inside. This was no sweat to Ed. He had done the same thing in the house he was moving from.

Ed is so good with his hands and enjoys working with them so much that seven years ago he quit his job as a banker and went into the landscaping business. He is what people call ''handy.'' The dictionary defines handy as ''dexterous,'' but most of us understand it as meaning that one can build or repair things. It is an adjective that, more often than not, is applied to men.

I am not handy, and this lack of ability leads me to ignore things that go wrong. I had a leaky water faucet that went unfixed for a year until the drips became a torrent and I finally called my landlord and had him send over a workman. I have a water heater that I do not know how to adjust, an air conditioner with filters that I do not know how to replace and a car whose tires I do not know how to change.

As a boy I heard women remark admiringly of my father: ''Morris is so handy.'' In this respect, I am not my father's son, and my not being ''handy'' often puts me in the decidedly unmasculine posture of having to ask other people for help.

How this lamentable state of affairs came about, I don't know. Surely, it's not from any lack of eye-hand coordination. I swung a mean bat in Little League baseball, and at one time I enjoyed an ''A'' ranking as a tennis player.

But I was never interested when my father tried to show me how to fix things. Perhaps that was my way of rebelling against him and his handiness. It first occurred to me that my two left hands could be considered ''unmanly'' in the most unpleasant experiences I had to endure in junior high school -- shop classes. I made my shop teachers furious. Other students learned how to make chairs, lamps and shelves; I couldn't learn how to plane a block of wood.

''Wigler,'' one of these teachers once shouted at me, ''are you an only child?''

I was not an only child. But I understood immediately that he found me spoiled and accustomed to having people do things for me.

Why should a man be expected to be handy? And why did I have to take shop when I would have much preferred home economics, where I could have made brownies, peanut brittle, hot cereal and other things I like to eat? I suspect that just as women were once expected to be homemakers, men were expected to be able to repay them by fixing things.

Perhaps there remains more truth in stereotypes than we care to admit. Communicating feelings and affections, for example, continues to be something that women usually do better than men. Men seem more comfortable with objects that need to be fixed than with emotions that need to be nurtured.

Maybe the fact that I'm not handy means that I'm the prototype of the ''new male.'' The new male has taken a lot of abuse lately, with men and women alike suggesting that he is nothing but a wimp. Better to be called names than have to fix a faucet.